Feedback on my new iPhone Development Service, is it relevant for games?

I am an iPhone developer myself. I didn't do any games yet, but developed many "regular" apps. For those apps I frequently had to include some dynamically loaded content. Content like a tip of the day, store locations of a retail chain, cocktail recipes etc.

I think this is always way too much effort. I either have to create a small web application with a database myself to manage and serve the content in JSON or XML or configure a large open source CMS to do this (which is a pain). And I have to host and maintain those systems, which costs time and money.

My hosted solution is cheaper, flexible and allows developers to configure many different data sets. Your own editors can manage the content for these data sets and you can then easily load that content into your mobile apps with JSON (with search and advanced queries). You could also load the JSON into your website with JSONP or into a desktop app, but this is currently not the focus.

Basically a CMS for non-HTML applications. I already developed a prototype and a landing page for this service. Before I continue with further development I would love to get some feedback from fellow developers, especially from game developers.

What do you think of this idea? Is this relevant for games as well? Would you use it (for help pages, trivia questions or any other content related to a game)? I am looking forward to your comments. Thanks.

Perhaps this is just me being grumpy, but also offering the ability to use XML-RPC queries would be nice. Using even RESTful calls from the iPhone is a total pain in the butt, and a kind of standard (like XML-RPC or JSON-RPC, which both have some good iOS libraries) to encapsulate even that would remove even more gruntwork out of the chore.

Some good MIT-licensed wrappers for Rails-centric RESTful API usage would indeed be yummy. You already appear to have a very well-polished site up to support your product, so whether you want to proliferate RPC or REST is up to you. Keep it up!

Another tidbit you might consider is an in-app purchasing server. I wrote one on contract, and my old employer doesn't want to release it. I still think it'd be a great tool to have in the arsenal of every iOS developer to have a cheap, ready-made service for distributing downloadable in-app content. It isn't hard, per se, but it's tedium that most would rather ignore (frees up more time to work on the features that make an app great).